There Will Come Soft Rains: Personification 3 key examples

Earlier mentions of fire establish a close association with death and rebirth. Shortly before dying, the McClellans’ dog runs in circles with “eyes turned to fire.” In Teasdale’s poem, where a verse foretells a time when “robins will wear their feathery fire,” flames meanwhile speak to a defiant capacity for regrowth. Fire bears the suggestion of both life and its absence, foreshadowing the flames to come that night.

In its larger, full-blown form, the fire at the McClellans’ house embodies this paradox of life and death. It is, by all accounts, a destructive force: the flames make quick work of the squeaking mice and hardly diminish under the mechanical rain. Unlike the McClellans’ dog, it successfully shrugs off all of the technology’s attempts at order.

The story portrays the fire as something that is as creative as it may be violent. In its most ironic sense, this act of destruction becomes a source of life. The fire wreaks havoc on the house but also comes closest to attaining life’s full organic force. “Now the fire lay in beds, stood in the windows, changed the colors of drapes!” the narrator exclaims, using personification to deepen the sense of fire as a thing with agency. The flames feed upon the Picassos and even the closet’s clothes as they retreat from the repellent. There is even a sense of playfulness as it outmaneuvers the repellant and sends its flames crackling up through the windows. Fire becomes the only actual inhabitant in this empty house, however short-lived its stay may be.

In this flurry of action, the mice participate in the house’s upkeep. The quasi-human actions—“thudded,” “whirling,” “kneading,” “sucking”—add a life-like quality to the cleaning robots, as though erasing the boundaries between organic life and artificial machines. The line where “metal” ends and life begins may be fainter than humans have imagined it to be. Strung together, these verbs emphasize the scale of the activity and sustain the appearance of life amid conditions so apparently inhospitable to it. The mice are so abundant that they even take on a parasitically proliferative quality: the rooms are “acrawl” with their movement. Through personification, this moment challenges the distinctions between machine and nature. The mice also represent an alternative to the anthropocentric arrogance of human civilization: the McClellans may have died, but their technology continues to live on.

In the first of these sentences, a simile links the fire’s movements to that of a frightened “elephant” recoiling before a snake. This is followed immediately by a metaphor that develops the comparison, identifying the “repellant” as the “snake.” Importantly, this transition from simile to metaphor intensifies the degree of comparison. The green chemicals don’t merely resemble “snakes”—at this point, they have become them. What had been understood to be the “dead snake” just one sentence before is now “whipping over the floor” and spewing “cold venom.” The repellant becomes more lifelike through the metaphor’s tightened association.

In doing so, this elaborate act of comparison invests the fire and repellant with an unlikely dynamism. Both the fire and its adversary are moving, attacking, and defending themselves. Their animalistic intensity creates a sense of vitality that is absent anywhere else. In a town of ruined houses buried beneath charcoal ash, they seem to be more lifelike and vivid than all of humanity’s own doomed creations.